Marketing a Developer Tool When You're Also the Developer

The old advice for solo founders was brutal: every minute marketing is a minute not building. Every minute building is a minute of invisibility. Pick your poison.

I rejected that trade-off. AI broke it.

Here's the thing: when AI writes your code, you're not choosing between building and marketing. You're doing marketing while AI builds. The constraint shifted from "hours in the day" to "how fast can I think clearly about what to build next."

This changes everything about how a solo founder should spend their time.

The Old Problem (And Why It's Gone)

The traditional developer-founder paradox:

To build something worth using, you needed uninterrupted focus. Deep work. Hours of flow state. No distractions.

To get anyone to use it, you needed visibility. Content. Engagement. Presence.

These demands were mutually exclusive. You couldn't be in flow state and checking Twitter. You couldn't be writing blog posts and debugging performance issues.

Most solo founders solved this by ignoring one side. They either shipped in silence (great product nobody knows about) or marketed constantly (mediocre product everyone's heard of).

AI-native development changes this equation.

When AI writes the code, you're not in a coding flow state that can be interrupted. You're orchestrating. Reviewing. Deciding. And between those decision points? You have time.

Time for marketing.

The Shift: Parallel, Not Sequential

In my post on planning vs building, I break down how I actually spend my time: 35% on specs, 20% on marketing, 20% on beta testing, and less than 1% writing code. But the key insight for marketing isn't the percentages—it's that these activities happen in parallel, not sequentially.

Notice what's missing from my day: "deep work coding sessions." I don't have those anymore.

What I have instead: parallel workstreams. While one feature is being built by AI, I'm writing a blog post. While a PR is running tests, I'm on a sales call. While Scout validates specs, I'm responding to beta user feedback.

The old 80/20 split (building vs marketing) assumed you could only do one thing at a time. That's no longer true.

Why Parallel Works

The traditional batching advice—"dedicate Friday to marketing"—made sense when building required flow state.

But AI-native development has a different rhythm:

Write spec (10-45 minutes of focused thinking)
AI executes (minutes to hours, depending on complexity)
Review PR (5-20 minutes)
Merge or request changes
Repeat

Between steps 1→2 and 2→3, there's time. Not always a lot—sometimes just 15 minutes. But those 15-minute windows add up.

I don't batch marketing into Fridays. I do marketing in the gaps:

While AI is implementing a feature, I write a tweet about the last one
While tests are running, I respond to community questions
While waiting for a PR review, I draft part of a blog post
While Sherpa validates specs, I schedule social media

This isn't context switching in the traditional sense. I'm not interrupting a flow state—I'm filling dead time that would otherwise be wasted on refreshing the PR page.

What Marketing Actually Works

After months of experimenting, here's what moves the needle:

What Works

Technical blog posts that show the methodology.

Not "how to use Kodebase" but "how I built X with AI" and "why I structured Y this way." Posts that would be useful even if you never used my tool.

These compound. A good post brings traffic for years. They establish the methodology as legitimate. They give people a reason to trust the approach.

Build-in-public updates.

When AI ships something interesting, I tweet about it. When a spec-to-PR cycle completes in 20 minutes, I share the timeline. When something fails, I document what went wrong.

The raw material for marketing is the building. I'm not creating content from nothing—I'm narrating what's already happening.

Demo videos that show the workflow.

Short (2-5 min) videos showing specs becoming PRs. Not polished. Just screen recordings with narration.

Founders and developers want to see the workflow work before they invest time trying it. Videos prove it's real.

Beta user conversations.

20% of my time is beta testing with real users. Those conversations are also marketing: every problem I solve, every win they have, becomes a testimonial, a case study, a tweet thread.

What Doesn't Work (For Me)

Daily posting quotas.

I tried "post every day." It ate attention. The engagement was fine. But I was optimizing for posting instead of for building things worth posting about.

The best marketing is shipping something people want to talk about. Consistent output matters less than consistent progress.

Paid acquisition.

Developers are ad-blind. The CAC for developer tools through paid channels is brutal. Maybe at scale with proven funnels. Not for an early-stage solo founder.

Cold outreach.

Response rate: near zero. It felt spammy because it was spammy.

The only outreach that works is warm—people who've already seen the methodology in action.

The Content Flywheel

Here's the system that produces content without consuming my life:

Every spec is content.

When I write a spec for a feature, I'm also writing the first draft of a "how we built X" post. The thinking I do for AI is the same thinking that makes good content.

Every PR is a demo.

When AI completes a PR, I can screen-record the diff, narrate what it does, and have a 2-minute demo video. No extra work—just capture what's already happening.

Every bug is a lesson.

When something fails, I document why. That documentation becomes a "what I learned" post. Failures are content gold.

Repurpose everything.

A blog post becomes a Twitter thread. A Twitter thread becomes a demo script. A demo becomes documentation. Every piece of content should produce at least three outputs.

The Hard Truth

Even with AI changing the equation, marketing a developer tool solo means accepting trade-offs:

You will be outpaced by funded competitors.

Companies with marketing teams will produce more content, run more campaigns, have more presence. You can't match their output.

But you can be better at the things that don't scale: authenticity, depth, showing the actual work. They have content teams; you have proof.

You will miss windows.

While you're reviewing a PR, someone will post about a problem you solve. You won't see it until hours later.

That's okay. Not every opportunity matters. The methodology creates its own opportunities over time.

You will feel invisible.

Weeks will pass where AI ships incredible work and nobody notices. The algorithm favors constant output over consistent progress.

This is psychologically brutal. Find ways to celebrate progress that don't depend on external validation. The commits are real. The tests pass. The product grows. That's what matters.

The Meta Point

If you're building with AI, the old marketing advice doesn't apply.

"Batch your marketing" assumes you have flow states to protect. You don't—you have orchestration gaps to fill.

"80/20 building vs marketing" assumes these are competing activities. They're not—they happen in parallel.

"The best marketing is a good product" is still true. But now you can build a good product and market it, because AI handles the execution while you handle everything else.

The new constraint isn't time. It's clarity. How fast can you think about what to build next? How clearly can you articulate why it matters?

Spec writing is building. Spec writing is also marketing. When you write a clear spec, you've done both.

That's the AI-native founder's advantage: the thinking that feeds AI is the same thinking that feeds content. Do one well, and you get both.